THE UNITED KINGDOM INFRARED TELESCOPE
ANNUAL REPORT
1995 AND 1996

6. UKIRT Upgrades

6.3. Pointing

Installation of the new top-end corrected problems with pointing errors as well as some curious oscillations of the telescope near the meridian. The pointing is now around 1.2 arcseconds rms over the sky when the pointing model is new. This is believed to be the best pointing performance of any equatorial telescope. Since source acquisition is always done after local correction of pointing relative to a star from an astrometric catalogue, this is almost academic except for the beneficial effect the excellent pointing has on the precision of the short slews from pointing check star to the source, which are now limited entirely by the encoder ripple of 0.3 arcseconds.